Paul's Down-Home Page

I know the title of this post sounds like a case study, but it isn’t. Remember that New York Times story last week about how Eli Lilly was negotiating with the US Department of Justice over a US$1 billion settlement? At first, Lilly thought the Gray Lady had gotten information from the DoJ… but it was one of their own lawyers who mistakenly sent a confidental e-mail thread memo to the NYT’s Alex Berenson instead of her fellow attorney, Sanford Brad Berenson. Oooops. Read the whole story here, then consider how much value an information rights management (IRM) system like Windows Rights Management might have provided to that law firm (to say nothing of the poor attorney who made a mistake– I bet her future career prospects are pretty dim.)

Update: Portfolio got a few of the details wrong, so I’ve edited the above post. NPR’s “On the Media” has an interview with Alex Berenson that provides some more background detail if you’re interested.

Intermedia, well-known as a provider of hosted Exchange services, just sent out a press release announcing their software-as-a-service hosted version of OCS 2007. They’re offering presence, IM, and PC-to-PC voice; no conferencing or telephony integration. Still, this is an interesting move, and it should be especially attractive to those who are already using, or considering, Intermedia as an Exchange hosting provider.

Technorati Tags: OCS 2007, Unified Communications

I got a very interesting press release from Ferris Research this morning. They performed a survey of more than 900 (for some reason, I want to say the exact number was 916) companies of various sizes and in various verticals. 654 of the companies were in North America; most of the rest were in Europe. I don’t have the full report to analyze it yet, but there are some very interesting claims:

• Across all organizations surveyed, Exchange has a 65% market share, with major strengths in healthcare and telecom enterprises.
• Internal and hosted POP/IMAP solutions are used in about 15 percent of organizations of all sizes, with 5% of large organizations using them.
• Notes/Domino has about 10% market share across the surveyed organizations, with particular strengths in manufacturing and financial services.

Ferris claims that this is “by far the largest survey ever done on messaging systems”. I’ve requested a copy of the full survey (benefits of being in the press, y’know) and will report more detail once I get it. For now, let’s just say that the numbers Ferris is reporting certainly don’t match up with the numbers claimed by Lotus advocates (and who would’ve guessed that POP/IMAP had such a penetration?) OBTW: GroupWise’s market share is “negligible”.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Exchange 2007, Unified Communications

As with so many other things, there’s a right way and a wrong way to create custom attributes for use with Exchange. These attributes can be made to appear in the custom attribute slots in Outlook, so you can extend the GAL (and views of it) to include things like birthdays, employee IDs, or other data not include in the schema. The wrong way is just to pick what looks like an unused MAPI attribute ID. Dave Goldman explains the right way here.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007